


Steve Misses Big Mike

by AnonEhouse



Category: Captain America (Movies), Iron Man (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bananas, Crack Treated Seriously, Gen, Humor
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-14
Updated: 2015-04-14
Packaged: 2018-03-22 19:12:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,133
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3740392
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnonEhouse/pseuds/AnonEhouse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve misses a lot of things, but somehow it's one of the least important things that keeps haunting him. Where did all the tasty bananas go?</p><p>(This is an AU where the Avengers stayed together in New York City. None of the subsequent movies happened.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Steve Misses Big Mike

(If you are reading this on any PAY site this is a STOLEN WORK, the author has NOT Given Permission for it to be here. If you're paying to read it, you're being cheated too because you can read it on Archiveofourown for FREE.)

You know, in seventy years, you expect a lot of things to change. Some of it Steve is wholeheartedly behind, like eradicating polio, and doing away with the worst of the tenements- the horrors that crammed people in like sardines, with no light or air in most of the rooms. He's a little disappointed in the lack of flying cars, but to be honest, as a New York City boy, he hadn't expected ever to have a car of his own. If it hadn't been for the army, he wouldn't even have learned to drive. So, you know, he rolls with most of the changes. Prices are absurd, but so's the salary SHIELD gives him basically for 'being on call'.

He tries to accept what's good, and ignore what he thinks is crap. He learns to avoid most of the aisles of boxed stuff in the grocery. So many chemicals, and printed so tiny he doubts anyone can even read them, even if they had a degree in chemistry to understand the ingredients. And what is a 'natural flavor'? Steve had tried a few 'natural flavor' foods, and they didn't taste like the foods photographed on the box. He found telephone numbers on some of the packages, and called to ask about it, and the confusing answer was that 'natural' meant the flavor was made from something that started out as a real plant or animal, but not necessarily the one it was supposed to taste like and they did all sorts of things to create a flavor that was stronger and more 'real' than the real thing. That... didn't make sense.

So, in the grocery he sticks to the meat, dairy, and produce aisles which makes shopping a lot faster than puzzling over packaged 'convenience' foods, and he's found a bakery that makes real bread. The produce isn't all that great, but if he sticks to the 'organic', things tend to have more taste. At first he thought that being frozen had damaged his sense of taste, but Dr. Banner had explained that in many countries, including the US, food production was now mostly run by huge businesses, not individual farmers, and they concentrated more on creating products that looked good, and could be shipped long distances without going bad, than on taste. Bruce had directed Steve to a farmer's market, and that had helped a lot. 

Except with the bananas. Bananas didn't grow locally, so he still had to get them from the grocery. And they were perfectly shaped, and perfectly yellow, and perfectly... blah. Steve put up with it for a few months. He was busy, after all and it was just bananas. But then there was a gap in training, and no villains around, and Steve's little apartment was fixed up the way he wanted it (Stark had offered him a floor in his Tower, along with the rest of the team, but Steve wanted to be on his own, to get used to the world, without Stark teasing him on his 'grandpa pants' and the way he parted his hair, and everything.)

So now he's at his neighborhood grocery, and there are all these rows of bananas, so alike it was as if they'd been pressed from a mold. The store manager is hovering nearby. Steve suspected they all knew who he was, but they had allowed him his privacy, so he had continued to shop there. "Excuse me," Steve says, "do you ever get any other kind of bananas?"

"Well, yes, sir, sometimes we get plantains. Or apple bananas," the man says quickly. "I can put in a special order if you like?"

He'd seen plantains a few times, and tried them, and they weren't what he wanted, either. "Apple bananas?" Steve really doesn't think that's possible.

"A cooking variety. I cut them up and put them in pancakes. Once you cook them, they do taste like apple."

"Sure, I'd try them," Steve says agreeably. "But I mean, what about... I guess, old-fashioned bananas? You know, they called them 'Big Mike'? They tasted a lot sweeter and stronger."

"I'm sorry, sir, I've never heard of them. These are Cavendish bananas. Everyone stocks Cavendish bananas." 

"Yeah, ok. Well, thanks anyway." Steve buys a couple boxes of raspberries, just to make the manager look less unhappy, and goes home.

But he can't stop thinking about the bananas. I mean. Bananas. Such a simple thing. He invites Bruce over to his apartment for dinner one night, mainly because he feels a little sorry for Bruce living at the Tower with Stark. Stark talks non-stop and is like a kid with too much candy even when he's not talking. That's got to be tiring. So Steve makes a simple green salad and spaghetti with meatballs, and toasts buttered slices of Italian bread with garlic powder.

They sit and relax while they eat, and as it naturally happens, the subject turns to food. And Steve has not been able to stop thinking about the bananas, so he complains. Just a little. "I don't understand it. It's so simple: put the seed in the ground, wait for the tree to grow, harvest bananas. I could see this new kind being more popular if it's, I don't know cheaper to grow, or something, but no one has _any_ Big Mike bananas! I've asked at every grocery I can find!"

Bruce has a bite of salad, and waits for Steve to stop waving his fork around, before answering. "Yeah, well, bananas are different. I bet you've heard people saying that the banana is nature's most perfect fruit?"

Steve nods. "It was. Oh, yeah, it was."

"Nope. Bananas are one of the most unnatural fruits ever. I learned a little about them when I was in South America. They don't grow them from seeds, because they normally don't have seeds and on the rare one in a million chance there's a viable seed, the plant's unlikely to be commercially any good. They're actually vegetatively cloned mostly from a hybrid of two related plants, neither of which is any good for eating. One's full of huge seeds and the other just tastes lousy."

Steve blinks. "How long has this been going on?"

"Um." Bruce has a bite of garlic toast, with a meatball balanced on top. "About fifteen thousand years?"

 

Steve thought it over long after Bruce had left to return to Stark's Tower. If they'd been growing bananas for fifteen thousand years, why did they have to ruin them just when Steve was gone for a lousy seventy years? It just was... it was just WRONG. It was just a little thing, just a fruit, and hey, he could do without eating one lousy kind of fruit. He'd been glad to eat _anything_ during the war. But... he wasn't at war, and damn it, a man ought to be able to eat a nice banana in AMERICA! The world was cruel and uncaring, and Steve's life SUCKED.

But Steve kept it together, and stayed calm. He didn't write nasty letters to the banana growing companies, and he stopped checking out every new grocery he happened to see. Big Mike was gone. Bucky was gone. Peggy was... well... sometimes, sorta there, when he got the nerve to visit, but not... not like she was. He accepted that people change, that technology changes, that the boundaries and names of countries on the globe change, even, but why, why can't a man have one simple, sweet, uncomplicated thing stay the same? 

But he kept calm, and did not obsess over the lost Big Mike. It's just that when he had to brush his teeth with paste, instead of powder, he thought of Big Mike. When he had to push the buttons in the elevator himself because there was no operator, he thought of Big Mike. When he saw a scantily-clad woman jogging in the park... well, no, he didn't think of Big Mike, then. It was just that the banana had become a symbol for everything that was missing, that was different. Like he had a banana crate in his mind and everything went in there to fill up the 'No Big Mike' crate.

 

And then one day the mental banana crate burst open. It really wasn't Steve's fault. The Avengers were chasing after a gigantic creature whose main characteristics were that it was mean and ugly. The idiot genius who'd created it had got stomped flat when he attempted to give it an order, and since then it was just running amok, smashing everything in its way. The Avengers had managed to herd it away from the city infrastructure, and it was taking out its frustration on vehicles abandoned on the expressway. This wasn't good, but at least no people were being hurt.

Then it tipped over a truck and stomped on it. The truck split... like an overripe banana. And the truck was full of bananas. The creature stomped again, and bananas flew everywhere. It went wild, stomping and slipping on the mashed bananas, howling and screeching. 

And then Tony and Clint began singing in unison, 'Thirty Thousand Pounds of Bananas'. Steve didn't remember too much of what happened next. He retained a few fragmented images of running through bananas and climbing up the monster's back and repeatedly smashing it on the head with his shield. He may have been screaming, "THIS IS FOR BIG MIKE! YOU KILLED BIG MIKE!" but then again, maybe he imagined that.

 

He woke up sometime later, feeling terribly embarrassed. "Everyone all right?" he asked, trying not to notice all the Avengers gathered around his bed in the fancy infirmary Tony had added to the Tower.

"Your deeds were epic!" Thor assured Steve, which was nice, but not what he needed to know.

"Everyone's fine," Bruce said, patting him on the shoulder. 

Natasha nodded. "Except for Big Mike?"

Clint looked sympathetic. "Someone you used to know?"

Steve forced out a laugh. "Bruce knows."

Bruce shrugged. "Gros Michel. 'Big Mike'. It was the kind of banana people used to get, before they got wiped out in a banana plague or something."

"Aw," Tony said, "That sucks. I made you a get well fruit basket, but now I feel bad about it." He was holding a badly wrapped lumpy object covered in colored tissue paper of several clashing colors. It looked like it'd been recycled from packaging.

"It's the thought that counts," Steve said gamely. "Give it here."

"All right. Even if you don't like the bananas, you might like something else." Tony put the lumpy thing on the bedside table. 

Steve sat up and tore the tissue paper apart. And stared. There were apples, and pears and grapes and other familiar fruits. Not the perfectly shaped, identical, tasteless things in the grocery, or even the pretty ok stuff from the farmer's market. They were a bit lumpy, and the colors were patchy, and they smelled. Oh, God, they smelled like real fruit. Steve pushed the paper further apart. And there were bananas. But they ... they... Steve grabbed one and peeled it and took a huge bite. He smiled so wide his mouth hurt. 

"Good?" Tony asked.

Steve reached out with his free hand, grabbed Tony by the collar of his t-shirt, and pulled Tony close. "Tony. This is a BIG MIKE! Where did you get it?"

"Oh." Tony flapped his arms around, trying for balance. "We've always had them. Get them delivered where ever I am." Tony's brow crinkled in thought. "Dad helped fund a plantation in... the Congo? Near Angola? Back way before I was born. Something about raising bananas in between timber as an experiment to see if 'forest' culture was better than mono-culture. So, you know. That's where the bananas come from."

"God Bless You, Howard Stark," Steve said. He released Tony and stared hungrily at the basket. "You get them at the Tower, all the time?"

"Uh huh," Tony said, trying to straighten out his collar. "Sure."

"That offer to move in still stand?" Steve asked.

Tony grinned. "Yeah. It comes with all the bananas you can eat." 

Steve smiled back at Tony. Maybe the future wasn't all that bad. But then he frowned at Bruce. "Why didn't you tell me Tony had Big Mike?"

"I didn't know!" Bruce protested. "Steve, remember I said I'd got to know bananas, living in South America? There were months I didn't eat anything else. I haven't touched a banana since."

"That's ok, I'll eat your share," Steve said.

**Author's Note:**

> Based on THREE AvengerKink prompts. There was apparently a bumper crop of Bananas...
> 
>  
> 
> [ Prompt 1](http://avengerkink.livejournal.com/19023.html?thread=43794255#t43794255)
> 
> [ Prompt 2](http://avengerkink.livejournal.com/19458.html?thread=47015426#t47015426)
> 
> [ Prompt 3](http://avengerkink.livejournal.com/18271.html?thread=41769055#t41769055)
> 
>  
> 
> Gros Michel, often known as Big Mike, ' lives in Jamaica, Thailand, and Malaysia, and in [ Congolese man-made forests near the border with Angola.](http://www.promusa.org/blogpost64-A-Gros-Michel-success-story) In the 1940s and 50s, INERA’s predecessor, the Institut National pour l’Etude Agronomique du Congo belge (INEAC), and the Forest Service initiated the planting of Limba (Terminalia superba) in the area’s secondary forests. INEAC also signed contracts with commercial banana producers allowing them to plant bananas as long as these were interspaced with Limba trees.


End file.
